Archive for October, 2011

I garden at a local community garden, which has a variety of methods of ensuring that people keep harmful plants or weeds out of their plots. (They’re mostly ineffective, but that’s another story and will be told another day.) The major method is to have someone walk around once in a while, see what’s growing, and send warnings to people who have let their plots become overgrown, or who are hosting especially pernicious plants.

Well, for some time I received warning messages, telling me to remove the weeds from my plot. Only problem: there weren’t any. Well, there were some plants that are often considered weeds, like Oxalis stricta, the yellow-flowered common wood sorrel. I let it grow in the boundary spaces between different types of plants to retain moisture and prevent soil from washing away in the rain. So I send some replies explaining what the plants were and why I’d left them. No responses, but I did get more warnings.

Eventually I got one saying that my plot would be taken away from me. Why? I’m not sure, but perhaps the Jerusalem artichokes I was growing at one end were the problem. They’re not weeds – far from it – but as they don’t bloom into very late in autumn maybe they were being confused with weeds.

I contacted the garden president, and she spoke to the reviewer – who then resigned in what I presume to be disgust. So… will I still have my plot next year? We’ll see.

In other news: our local library misplaced three of the books I returned on a day the library closed early for a staff workshop. One was later found on the library’s shelves, the other two have never been found, despite two searches by library staff.

So, as I was informed by the people behind the counter, the library will only charge me half the late fee for the found book. How generous! I intend to pay them nothing – nothing – but I suspect they’re going to see things differently.

Plus, the frame of my only remaining pair of glasses snapped due to metal fatigue.

I occasionally catch cooking shows such as the ones on Food Network, and rarely browse/purchase magazines when I pass by them. And one of the recent trends which I keep coming across is putting bacon (or its classy Italian sibling, prosciutto) on everything. Everything! On breads,on seafoods, on roasts, on fruits! On watermelon, even.

I’m sure it tastes delicious. It’s bacon, after all. But it seems like cheating – practically anything would be delicious wrapped in bacon. Even sticks and mud would taste good that way. Shouldn’t attempts to get people to cook well involve more than wrapping their offerings in overpoweringly-esculent meat products?